Paint spray guns are common tools for painting walls, ceilings, objects or other kinds of surfaces which are large or difficult to approach directly. Paint spray tools usually have an arm or a handle whose length is fixed, and such an arm gives the option to reach more distant areas from the painter's point of view. A paint spray gun may include one or several nozzles which are normally arranged along a straight line arrangement. With a plurality of nozzles lined in orthogonal direction in relation to the movement direction of the spraying device, the user obtains wider painting area with a single brush.
Especially in painting walls, ceilings and roofs, there emerges a need to use longer arms or tools in order to reach the surfaces to be painted which locate farther from the painter him/herself. The longer the distance between the paint spray gun user and the surface to be painted, the bigger possibility for non-accuracy in the painting process emerges.
In prior art, the paint spray guns with longer arms use a fixed structure where the arm and the paint nozzles locate in a fixed mutual angle. Such a construction of the spray gun with a longer arm results in that when painting e.g. a higher wall along a vertical movement of the spray gun, the paint output direction from the nozzles is different in the lower part of the wall compared to the higher part of the wall. Even a variable length arm, where the arm length could be changed by a motor, would easily result in a changing paint output direction towards the surface to be painted, and therefore the painting quality could easily get worse.
In some solutions, the nozzle direction could be mechanically or manually changed by rotating the nozzle around a joint, with the nozzle achieving a new angle in relation to the arm supporting the nozzle. The manual and mechanical adjustment is pretty inefficient, and requires a lot of manual work besides the actual painting process which also takes time. The turning joint also has a deficiency that only certain angle values are possible because the joint must enable the flow of the liquid through itself as well.
In prior art, a painting robot for painting cars automatically in the end of their manufacturing process, is an example where a robot arm provides the spraying function. A relevant characteristic in these applications is that their movements i.e. the painting arm paths need to be well defined and pre-adjusted before the actual painting process. The system would not work without preinstalled routes in the controller of the painting robot for the vehicles.
Concerning other technology areas, in camera technology and especially their alignment tools in machine- or manually directed photographing systems, there has been introduced a camera gimbal system. Such a gimbal with its controller is shown e.g. in US 2013/0321656. The camera gimbal controller includes motion sensors, such as a digital gyroscope, an accelerometer and magnetometers. All these sensors detect movements in three dimensions and their data is fed to a microcontroller. All the sensor data provides an accurate estimate of the current position and movement of the gimbal. The gimbal controller may provide the movement (panning, tilting and rolling) commands to the camera after the user has e.g. moved a personal smart phone as a joystick in order to give camera directions through movement of the phone (through a special application). The camera itself is attached to an arm structure which includes several joints. These joints allow rotating or turning around one, two or three axes in order to enable movement and rotation freely in 3-dimensional environment.
There is a need to introduce an intelligent paint spraying device whose paint output angle towards the painted surface is controlled in a clever manner in various different circumstances.